TITLE: Community Supported Agriculture Around the World

SUBTITLE: farmers and organizers of CSA in three different countries will share experiences in adapting the CSA concept to their particular cultural context.

Name: Speakers: Kiera Mulvey (US), Danijel Balaban (Croatia) and Shi Yan (China). Moderator: Jocelyn Parot (France).

Speakers' presentation:

Kiera Mulvey worked several years as the Executive Director of the FairShare Coalition, the Community Supported Agriculture network in Madison, Wisconsin; Danijel Balaban is a new farmer from Croatia, who is trying to settle a CSA, and has been participating in several peer-to-peer exchange programmes between CSA movements in Europe;

Shi Yan is the co-founder of Shared Harvest, the second major CSA experience in Beijing, China. She is also the translator of Elizabeth Henderson’s Sharing the Harvest, the famous handbook about CSA;

Jocelyn Parot is the General Secretary of Urgenci, the international CSA network. He has been in charge of several experience-sharing projects in Europe.

Summary:

The idea of Community Supported Agriculture hits a positive chord with many farmers and even more locavores.  So far, there is no legal definition.  The initiators in the US wanted it that way so that each farm could use the basic concept in site-specific manners.  Recently, CSAs have been increasing in number rapidly in the US, at least if you take the self-proclaimed advertisements at face value. Even faster growth has been happening in some European countries. Meanwhile Urgenci and its allies have been spreading the word about CSA in sixteen countries, in Eastern and Western Europe, in North Africa and Asia, setting up face-to-face, farmer-to-farmer and consumer meetings. 

Background:

Community Supported Agriculture is often mentioned as the missing part of the new distribution food systems. For example, the Special Rapporteur of the United Nations on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter, is specifically referring to the CSA model when he is advocating  the new alliances between producers and consumers. De Schutter points out the necessity to give access to market to family farmers with agroecological techniques. Improving agroecological, sustainable techniques is not enough. A new strategy to secure markets for small holders is also necessary.

Main Chapter:

In this workshop, you will hear activists from three different continents, USA, China and Europe talk about what they think CSA means. Are there values or organizing principles that unite CSAs across international boundaries.  Or is CSA just a trendy term for any box of local or not so local farm produce sold to consumers? Can we speak of a worldwide CSA movement?

In the US, where CSAs have been growing steadily since the mid-1980s, the key issues that keep coming up in the 2010s sound like the following questions: are local produce aggregators that have no farm base part of this CSA ferment? If members do not share the risk with the farmers, are farm based distribution schemes really CSAs? Is it time for a legal definition? if so, who write it and who should enforce it? 

In China, the situation is rather different since Community Supported Agriculture in its American definition is something absolutely new. Shi Yan, who has a long experience in the 2 first recognised CSA farms in Beijing area, will explain the large echo of these  nascent initiatives in the Chinese society and the challenges for the next year of development.

Jocelyn Parot and Danijel Balaban will provide an international and an European perspective on the CSA movements. Urgenci (www.urgenci.net) with its allies has been instrumental in offering a solid frame for face-to-face, farmers-to-farmers and consumers’ meetings around the globe. The most extensive exchange programs have been led in Europe: during the past 4 years, 70 missions and information tours have taken place in 20 different countries. CSA stakeholders have been offered the opportunity to travel abroad to share their experience: about 200 international travels have been sponsored. These exchanges have been kept down to earth: no less than 150 farms have been visited, and 700 local farmers met. Apart from the popular success (nearly 2,700 consumers have taken part into the 76 public meetings organized during the info tours), what are the results of CSA promotion actions? What is to be learnt from these multilateral peer –based exchanges? Local stories are undeniably the core of the program. But is that all? Urgenci missions also show that there is a common ground. Beyond the cultural specificities, beyond the diversity of actions, can one speak of a worldwide CSA movement?

Core Messages:

-          Community Supported Agriculture is a tool to strengthen the position of small-scale farmers in the food chain, to contribute to the realization of the right to food in urban and rural communities and overall rural development;

-          Community Supported Agriculture is an universal but context –sensitive tool, that can be adapted in highly diversified agricultural landscapes;

-          A “normalisation” of the CSA model is probably not needed at a global scale, but locally/regionally action should be taken by regional CSA networks to preserve the specificities of this contract –based direct selling system.

Conclusions:

-          Innovative short-chain distribution schemes like CSA can offer solutions to reenergise organic farming and offer an alternative to industrial organic production models;

-          The development of Community Supported Agriculture is often a way to support the rise of a new type of small scale, sustainable, organic, GMO free, family farming, and foster a new « peasantry »;

-          There is a need for a reinforced international network of CSA movements, in order to make the Community Supported Agriculture movement conscious of itself, and of its own power and forces. There is a need to raise awareness about the movement’s role at the crossroads between 3 larger movements: the Food Sovereignty Movement, the Organic agriculture movement and Solidarity –based Economy.